Temperature Langmuir-Hinshelwood isotherms

The oxidation of propylene oxide on porous polycrystalline Ag films supported on stabilized zirconia was studied in a CSTR at temperatures between 240 and 400°C and atmospheric total pressure. The technique of solid electrolyte potentiometry (SEP) was used to monitor the chemical potential of oxygen adsorbed on the catalyst surface. The steady state kinetic and potentiometric results are consistent with a Langmuir-Hinshelwood mechanism. However over a wide range of temperature and gaseous composition both the reaction rate and the surface oxygen activity were found to exhibit self-sustained isothermal oscillations. The limit cycles can be understood assuming that adsorbed propylene oxide undergoes both oxidation to CO2 and H2O as well as conversion to an adsorbed polymeric residue. A dynamic model based on the above assumption explains qualitatively the experimental observations. 

A simple Langmuir-Hinshelwood model explains quantitatively the steady-state behavior (4) but it fails to explain the oscillatory phenomena that were observed. The origin of the limit cycles is not clear. Rate oscillations have not been reported previously for silver catalyzed oxidations. Oxidation of ethylene, propylene and ethylene oxide on the same silver surface and under the same temperature, space velocity and air-fuel ratio conditions did not give rise to oscillations. It thus appears that the oscillations are related specifically to the nature of chemisorbed propylene oxide. This is also supported by the lack of any correlation between the limits of oscillatory behavior and the surface oxygen activity as opposed to the isothermal oscillations of the platinum catalyzed ethylene oxidation where the SEP measurements showed that periodic phenomena occur only between specific values of the surface oxygen activity (6,9). 

An example of a model nonlinear in parameters is Eq. (7-166). Here it is not possible through any number of transformations to obtain a linear form in all the parameters k0, E, K o, Eaa, Km, Ea. Note that for some Langmuir-Hinshelwood rate expressions it is possible to linearize the model in parameters at isothermal conditions and obtain the kinetic constants for each temperature, followed by Arrhenius-type plots to obtain activation energies (see, e.g., Churchill, The Interpretation and Use of Piate Data The Rate Concept, McGraw-Hill, 1974). 

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